Apple’s antitrust fight begins

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, Lauren Feiner and Nilay Patel discuss the breaking news about the the US Department of Justice accusing Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in an expansive new antitrust lawsuit. Further reading: US v. Apple: everything you need to know US sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones The US Department of Justice is suing Apple — read the full lawsuit here The lock-in problem at the heart of the DOJ’s case against Apple Beeper couldn’t bring iMessage to Android — but it can still make a great chat app What else can Humane’s AI pin do? These toddler games for iPad are actually good — and that's all too rare YouTube TV’s multiview comes to iPhones and iPads in time for March Madness Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

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• 0:59David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the performance smartphone market, which means something.

• 1:05Alex Cranz?

  It means meow.

• 1:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're going to spend the whole show figuring out what the performance smartphone market is because that's what we do here on The Vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce. Alex Krantz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 1:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who is so excited to talk about the news we've got today.

• 1:17David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. Pure, unadulterated chaos. Neil Patel is not here. He is, I think, last we heard in an airport somewhere.

• 1:26Alex Cranz?

  Somewhere.

• 1:27David Pierce?

  Florida? Maybe Florida. I don't know. Neil is going to come on the show in a little while because he could not possibly ditch The Vergecast. But for now, Lauren Feiner here. Hi, Lauren.

• 1:35Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 1:36David Pierce?

  You've had what I would call a couple of days. How are you holding up?

• 1:41Speaker 04

  I truly have. I'm hanging in there. It's been busy.

• 1:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I believe it. So we have a lot to talk about and almost all of it is just about Apple. Huge antitrust lawsuit against Apple. We're going to talk about that, then we're going to talk about that more, and then we're going to do a lightning round and not talk about antitrust law for once. But let's just divert it. There is lots to get to here, and I think the first thing we should try to do is just, like, explain this messy, long, complicated complaint as well as we can. So Lauren, at the risk of totally setting you up to do something impossible here, just start at the beginning. What happened here today?

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this morning, the DOJ and 16 state and district attorneys general sued Apple for maintaining an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market. So basically, what they're saying here is that Apple has basically made consumers and developers more reliant on their ecosystem through a series of actions. So they say they've done things like disrupt super apps that could encompass a bunch of different programs that would make the stickiness of iOS less for consumers and developers, or suppressing the quality of messaging between iPhones and Androids, you know, those infamous green bubbles.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  So there's all sorts of things in this lawsuit that the DOJ is going after and basically just saying that Apple has abused its dominant position in the smartphone market.

• 3:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I feel like, I've been trying to think how I would summarize all of this. And there's a ton of details, and I actually think one very useful thing this suit did was sort of divide itself into five categories, and I want to talk about each of those five categories. But I feel like in a lot of cases, it's basically like you either bought your way into a monopoly, which is not allowed, or you have done some kind of shady stuff in order to remain in monopoly, which is also not allowed. This is neither of those things.

• 3:44Alex Cranz?

  This is, this is basically like, they took all of my complaints about iOS and said, actually, that's illegal.

• 3:52David Pierce?

  I mean, kind of.

• 3:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and I'm like, I was reading it, and I was like, yes, yes, you get it. I hate the green bubbles. Yeah, I should be able to use a different watch. I was like, get it, Cantor. I had the best time reading it. I don't know if it's actually illegal, but I guess that's why we have a court system, huh?

• 4:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're going to get to that, because I too have that question. But I feel like, Lauren, tell me what you think of this, this read that I've been workshopping over the last few hours, which is that basically what the DOJ is saying is that Apple has done a series of things to keep Competitors and users from getting the most out of their iPhone or the most out of all the experiences they have in the iPhone. And so what consumers are getting is worse products for more money that are harder to walk away from in any way, shape or form. And that that is how Apple has abused its monopoly. That it is so powerful, not that it is explicitly doing something nefarious

• 4:53David Pierce?

  to one of its competitors, but that it is just making everything worse for everybody and that that shouldn't be allowed. How far off am I?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  That's essentially the argument. You know, they're basically saying, you know, Apple has through many different actions across different areas. You just made it so that it's just a little bit worse to use its products or use someone else's products in combination. So, you know, just making it so it's, there's more incentive to stay on the Apple platforms than to try to combine it with something else or move to something else.

• 5:31Alex Cranz?

  Which is like by design, like we talk about it all the time on this show. Apple does all of this because it likes money.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it's not illegal to like money.

• 5:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, apparently it is a little illegal.

• 5:45David Pierce?

  Well, and that's, that's the like crazy mental gymnastics of this suit to me, which I think it's going to be so interesting to see how all of this goes. Cause it's basically saying the iPhone is bad. It's like a fundamental part of this argument. Or like, at least if it's not bad, it's not nearly as good as it could be. And Apple is doing that on purpose. And the only reason Apple would do that on purpose is to prevent people from leaving. Which if you think about it and just say it like that, is bananas.

• 6:16Alex Cranz?

  It but like.

• 6:17David Pierce?

  But also it like, it sort of holds. And this is where we should probably get into like each of the five things that, that Apple is being sort of accused of doing this to. And there's a much longer list of, of like actual accusations here, but the DOJ really boils it down to five things. And I'm just going to read the five things. So it's basically super apps, which Lauren, you mentioned. Cloud streaming services, by which it mostly means game streaming services. Messaging apps, smartwatches and digital wallets.

• 6:48David Pierce?

  What a fivesome.

• 6:51David Pierce?

  But let's just do these one at a time. And I think we should basically do it in the order in which the suit does it. And Alex, you and I have been talking about the super apps thing all day.

• 6:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:59David Pierce?

  Explain the case for the super apps here.

• 7:01Alex Cranz?

  OK, so they are saying that super apps, which are super, super popular in Asia, to the point that Apple, they have like notes from Apple being like, yeah, those are super popular in Asia. That would be super bad if they got super popular here in the United States.

• 7:14David Pierce?

  And by super apps, it's like, I mean, WeChat is like a canonical example.

• 7:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, WeChat, Kakao Talk, a lot like most countries in Asia have some sort of app that like you can do just everything in. And we don't have that. We have iOS and Android here. And so they're saying that these apps have been consistently like kind of deprioritized and made worse on iOS. And they go through a lot of it. And it's kind of true. Like, we don't know quite if people don't like super apps in the United States because we just don't like super apps, or if it's because the experience is kind of crummy on iOS and we all use iOS. Well, not all, but a big chunk of us, 60 something percent of the market, I think, is what the DOJ said.

• 8:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, and they kept saying things like 75% of new phones are bought are iPhones. And even that probably under represents the monopoly number. And it's like, well, then tell me what the monopoly number is. But anyway, I digress. Lauren, I'm really curious what your read on this one was to me, because I think the other four here are things we've heard everybody yell at Apple about for a very long time, right? Like, it was pretty obvious this was going to be about game streaming. It was pretty obvious this is going to be messaging apps. Smartwatches was a little bit of a right turn, but so was digital wallets. But we can come back to this. Super apps, I would not, in a million years, if you had been like, David, what are the 50 things in this lawsuit going to be about? I would not have picked super apps. What's your read on all this?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was surprising to me, too. I think it just seems to fit this general theme that the DOJ is going after, that super apps, that basically they're saying that Apple is trying to lock down its ecosystem so that, you know, developers can only do so much and, you know, you can't interoperate to a great degree. And they don't want to do things that will take away from Apple's own services and its own ecosystem. That this is how the DOJ is characterizing it. So I think it just fits the theme. And so that's something that they decided to go with. I think it is kind of surprising, given that, you know,

• 9:26Speaker 04

  we don't really see a lot of super apps here in the US. So it's kind of like, is that a chicken or the egg problem? Is it, would we have more super apps if Apple was open to them? Or are they just not that popular here for other reasons?

• 9:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, I've spent a decade talking to people about that question. And over and over, the answer from people has been, well, we just don't want it in the US. But I do think it's true that it is also, we've never really tested the theory in the US. Like, WeChat is on the App Store, which I suspect Apple will be happily reminding lots and lots of people of in the very near future. But it's not the same app. And like, the thing about WeChat is that, like, in a place like China, and I have not lived in China, so I can't say this for sure, but I've heard that this is true, is that like, WeChat is more important than your phone, right? WeChat is the thing. And as long as it's there, you're good. Like, the hardware doesn't matter as much. So on the one hand, A, that has made China's smartphone

• 10:26David Pierce?

  market like incredibly cool and competitive, because all you need is something that runs WeChat. So they all have to compete on something else. So they build all this wacky hardware. There are a million different brands out there doing stuff. They were early on foldables. They were early on flip phones. They were early on big new fablet phones. Like, the China market is thriving as hardware, in part because WeChat is the thing.

• 10:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, which is kind of proving the point that the DOJ makes, which is that we can't do all the cool stuff here because Apple is standing in the way of it. And that's

• 10:59Alex Cranz?

  I don't know. That always feels true to me. That has felt like a complaint. We're all like, "Yeah, I really want a folding phone. Well, I'm gonna wait till Apple makes one."

• 11:06David Pierce?

  No, I think that's totally fair. Also, have you ever used WeChat?

• 11:10Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 11:10David Pierce?

  That app is a nightmare.

• 11:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  It's just, and this is, this is kind of what we're talking about. Like, it's either a cultural difference, and there are a lot of people who make the case that it is a cultural difference, that in the US, we like, we like cleaner, simpler, more sort of straightforward and siloed-off software. That is, that is, I don't know how you prove that, but that is a thing.

• 11:30Alex Cranz?

  I mean, Apple likes that.

• 11:31David Pierce?

  And has been true for a long time, right?

• 11:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:33David Pierce?

  Whereas in China, the idea of having every possible thing that exists in the world just sort of shoved in one place, works. That's just what folks are used to. And yeah, like, the counterfactual of like, if it were just as easy to do in the US, would we have it? We'll never know. But I do agree with you that like, there is something in that logic that holds, that if you make the app, then the app has all kinds of fascinating antitrust things and would probably be getting sued for the same thing. But at least, like, if you want to make the case that that is what is keeping the hardware market from thriving, China seems like it would prove that case.

• 12:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and I think like, what we see again and again in this complaint from the US government is that they feel the United, they feel Apple has become dominant. Apple dominates the market, in the United States specifically.

• 12:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:22Alex Cranz?

  And that has totally warped how we use different apps. And that is like, just straight up true, right? Every single time we write a story about a green bubble, some of our international colleagues are like, "Why are you writing about green bubbles? Do you know WhatsApp exists?" And it's like-

• 12:38David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 12:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and we don't use it because we use iMessage, because it is the dominant platform in the United States, because Apple is the dominant smartphone maker in the United States.

• 12:46David Pierce?

  I see, but then, if you like, rewind back further, we adopted things earlier in the United States. So what we actually did was we got hooked on SMS. And WhatsApp came up because SMS was really expensive in places where people couldn't afford SMS. And in the US, by and large, we could. And so we just, we got hooked on SMS, and then WhatsApp like, end around it. And the thing that iMessage did that was so smart was build on top of it.

• 13:13Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 13:13David Pierce?

  Which is also in the same antitrust suit. But- Lauren, the thing I kept thinking about was I expected this first thing that's actually about super apps to be about web apps. And this is a thing we've been hearing a lot of is that like there's been this big fight over the PWAs, progressive web apps, and this idea that like actually what Apple is doing is systematically making the web worse. And this has been a big part of the fight in the EU over how to make sort of these cross-platform web apps work better on the iPhone, whether Apple allows it or not. There wasn't really that much of like the web in this complaint. Was that as surprising to either of you as it was to me? That shocked me, honestly.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  I guess it's because they're focusing on this iPhone mobile device ecosystem. And it seems like everything is really focused on how they've been able to advance this iPhone platform to maintain their monopoly.

• 14:10Alex Cranz?

  They do talk about web apps in this. And what was interesting was they were like, basically, we considered web apps. That is part of this. But that's already part of the monopoly because it all has to be built on, like it's part of the bigger complaint, which is that Apple forces people to do things in the Apple way, thus limiting development, limiting progress.

• 14:30David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, it's sort of a tangential way.

• 14:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so it's like tangential, but it's like, well, you have to use WebKit to do anything on an iPhone. So you're stuck in it. We can't even talk about web apps because WebKit exists. It's kind of like how they treat it.

• 14:46David Pierce?

  My theory is also that whoever wrote and filed this lawsuit decided that trying to explain the concept of PWAs and browser engines and all of this was just like not worth the hassle. Whereas you can just say "super app" out loud and people like sort of understand what it is. Where you're like, "The progressive web app on my phone doesn't have access to the local cache." Like, everybody just falls asleep.

• 15:10Alex Cranz?

  They specifically say, they specifically say in it, "Yeah, nobody knows how to use web apps on iOS because it's really complex and weird and hard." And I was like... That's true.

• 15:22David Pierce?

  Do you even know how to find the add to home screen button? Like, no, no one knows.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Sometimes. I think you really can't underestimate how much the DOJ is going to have to like really simplify this when they get to court.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Because having gone to the DOJ Google trial, you know, there's a lot, you know, the judge at times would be like, you know, what are these things? And sometimes they're simple things, sometimes they're complicated terms. But these are judges that, you know, for one thing, aren't usually taking antitrust cases a lot of the time, especially not anti-monopoly cases. And second of all, definitely don't know the ins and outs of such a technical ecosystem. So, you know, I think there is something to like wanting to have a simple story to tell.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, and speaking of that, I think the the next thing on the list, the second one in the five, was the game streaming services, which is another one that I think is like a sort of viscerally understandable thing. Like, why can't I play Fortnite on my iPhone? Is actually like a sort of universally understood question at this point. Axe, you want to explain that one?

• 16:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so back in 2019, everybody said cloud gaming is going to be a thing. And Apple said, not on my watch. Like, that's really what happened. Everybody was rolling it out. It worked, you could get these apps on Android, and Apple was like, no, we're not going to put that on on our stuff. I remember talking to Google and Microsoft and Nvidia at the time being like, do you guys want to give a comment on this? And then Epic sued Apple, saying, you know, it was all related, right? All of this was was related. And Apple kind of like would walk it back very occasionally to be like, okay, well, you can have cloud gaming, but it can only be in those web apps that nobody knows how to use. And that's that's one way you could do it.

• 17:14Alex Cranz?

  Or you can put it on the store, but we have to approve every single game. And like, no one was going to do that. If you've got 200 games, you have to get all 200 games approved. If you've got three games, you have to get them all. Like, nobody wants to do that. You have to get every update approved. And so it was really, really onerous. And it really, it wasn't the only reason cloud gaming has not become just the the new hot thing and everybody doesn't care about the PS5.

• 17:41David Pierce?

  But it didn't help.

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  It did not help. Yeah, it really, it really hurt things.

• 17:45David Pierce?

  Well, and I actually, I really liked this one in particular because I felt like that was where the DOJ did the best job of explaining just like what a gigantic pain in the ass Apple inflicts upon its developers who want to make things for iOS, where it was basically like, like you said, you have to go through, you have to get every single game approved, you have to run each one of them differently. These games get updated constantly. Most of them are like service games that are just running all the time. These live services games are everywhere now. You have to get every single update approved through this like opaque, occasionally nonsensical Apple review process. Or you have to like carve out a completely different game for Apple and run everything over there,

• 18:28David Pierce?

  elsewhere, and then have a specific game for the iPhone. That it was just like, and this was kind of the point that they're continuing to make is it doesn't necessarily matter whether it's possible, but it is such a gigantic hassle and pain and awful process for everyone involved, that no reasonable developer can be asked to do it. And this is again where I feel like we're in this weird sort of legal jujitsu thing that the DOJ is trying to do, where it's like, if Apple had just kept going to Epic and saying, "Never game streaming on the App Store, ever." That's a thing you can poke at, right? Like that is a fight that you can actually pick in this way. But what it's actually saying is like, "Okay, sure. Good luck assholes."

• 19:12David Pierce?

  And that's, that's so much the vibe of like a lot of what happens on the App Store. And we've all heard from developers over the years who go through this awful process. Your app gets banned for reasons you don't understand. Updates don't get approved for days or weeks or months or ever. And so much of this just boils down to this thing where like, Apple is running its whole process in such an awful way, that it can't possibly be doing it for anyone's benefit. It must be monopoly maintenance. Which is like, I don't know, slightly hard for me to wrap my head around, but it feels true in a certain way.

• 19:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it passes the stiff test.

• 19:47David Pierce?

  It does. I agree with that.

• 19:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, like it has a big whiff. And we talked about this a lot in the past few weeks because of what's going on in Europe, where they're like, "Oh yeah, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna do what you ask, in the most obnoxious way possible. And just, just make it as painful as possible. You will hate yourself for it. And you're probably not gonna do it." And the government's like, "Hey..." Stop.

• 20:10David Pierce?

  Well, and that's what we've heard from all the developers in the EU, right? Like, all the browser makers were like, "Oh, that's so nice of you. We can use our own rendering engine, but now we have to build two versions of our app inside one version of our app that just sort of automatically selects..." Like, no, we're not doing that. And they've all basically been like, "No, this is actually worse than it was before."

• 20:26Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 20:27David Pierce?

  "You've made our lives harder in the name of pretending to make it easier." And that feels like, if I were to boil all of these accusations down, it would be that.

• 20:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:36David Pierce?

  That Apple, Apple keeps claiming it's trying to do good things for its users, and all it does is make everything worse for everybody.

• 20:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Lauren, how do you feel?

• 20:44David Pierce?

  Cool times.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  I think this one is interesting, because I think if you look at the streaming games claims, it kind of helps you understand the super apps claims in a way, because, you know, if you think about it, like, the way that David, you were saying, WeChat in China is like more important than the phone itself. You know, the DOJ is saying here, like, "Apple looked at cloud gaming and was like, 'Oh, if that is the North Star, then the hardware doesn't matter as much, and we can't have the hardware not matter.'"

• 21:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  Because we want to make superior hardware, and we want that to be valuable to people. So I think that seems to be like the theme that I'm seeing between those two claims.

• 21:27David Pierce?

  That strikes me as way less compelling than the super app example. Like, I do think, in theory, the super app thing holds. And again, like, in China, it seems to be real. I just don't think there are that many people out there who are like, "If I can't play my two games, I'm switching phone operating systems."

• 21:46Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 21:46David Pierce?

  Maybe I'm wrong.

• 21:47Alex Cranz?

  I don't think that was the argument.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  And maybe there's a whole generation of kids who are like, growing up on Roblox, and Roblox will be more important to them than what phone they use. I don't know. But for right now, like, it does seem like, yeah, like, like you're saying, Lauren, if you go through the argument, it's like, "Okay, if I can play cloud games, I all of a sudden realize, 'Oh, I can play cloud games anywhere. I'm gonna switch phones.'" I just, is that how that works? I don't know.

• 22:07Alex Cranz?

  See, this is where, David, your gadget love is shining through.

• 22:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 22:13Alex Cranz?

  And Lauren, are you a giant gadget nerd? It's okay if you're not. I'm not the biggest gadget nerd, but I like some gadgets. Okay.

• 22:21David Pierce?

  Well, that's Lauren Feiner, everybody.

• 22:23Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  She'll never be on The Verge cast again.

• 22:24Alex Cranz?

  No, but I think this is a great moment for Lauren because David and I, we're gadget nerds. We know what the processor is called in the iPhone and we care a lot about that. And we care about that speed and we care about that performance and the stuff outside of the apps. Lauren, if you didn't have to, like, if you could just get the cheapest phone and it would do all the stuff you needed it to do because it was all based in the cloud, would you save? Would you not spend $1,600 on a new phone? Probably. Yeah, and a lot of people are that way and not like us. And probably, most of our listeners are probably like, Lauren, how dare you? I know, I'm sorry. And there's a lot, there's a lot of people around you who are just like Lauren. Many of your friends and family are probably like, Lauren, it's hard to understand. I'm working to process it as well.

• 23:08David Pierce?

  Please send all gadget recommendations to [email protected]. She'd love to hear from you, the more expensive the better. No, I think, I think you're right as a whole, right? Like, on that theory, like, I think about this with, like, Chrome OS, right? Like, what Chrome OS proved is that most people want the cheapest thing that kind of works. And this has become a huge problem for Google because they can't sell you good things that make money because all anybody wants is the cheapest thing that kind of works.

• 23:32Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 23:33David Pierce?

  I think that's also true to an extent with a lot of smartphones. And I think, I mean, it's surely not an accident that Apple has not sold $400 phones because I think a lot of people would buy them and that's actually pretty bad for business if you're Apple, right? Like, that's-

• 23:47Alex Cranz?

  You have a 30% markup on a phone.

• 23:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. Granted, I'm just saying, I don't think games are that thing.

• 23:53Alex Cranz?

  No, I agree with that.

• 23:54David Pierce?

  I think the idea, if I could have an exactly, like, an equivalent smartphone experience. And to be fair, I think, like, if, again, a lot of this argument from the DOJ adds up to what you're saying, like, I should be able to have an equivalent smartphone experience anywhere and Apple is preventing me from that. And if I could, a lot of people would leave the iPhone. I think that's true. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see to what extent we actually get to see that bear out.

• 24:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:17David Pierce?

  I'm just saying, I don't think games are that thing.

• 24:19Alex Cranz?

  I would agree with that totally. And I say that as a gamer who used every single one of those cloudy gaming services. Did you know Luna's still around?

• 24:27David Pierce?

  Oh, Luna.

• 24:28Alex Cranz?

  Remember Luna? Yeah.

• 24:30David Pierce?

  Nobody's better at having products you forgot about, but are still just kicking than Amazon.

• 24:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Google kills them and the ones you like. Amazon leaves the ones you've never heard of alive.

• 24:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, Amazon just puts it like further down in the menu system on amazon.com. And that's, that's all that happens to them. All right, we should go to the next one, which is messaging apps. Lauren, do you want to explain this one? This one feels like the most like mainstream relevant of the five. Do you want to explain what's going on here?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Totally. Yeah, this is one that I think everyone is going to be like, oh, yeah, I've been complaining about this for years. Which is that, you know, it's basically the green bubble problem of that when you are messaging someone from an iPhone to an Android, you're seeing a green bubble on your screen instead of blue. And so basically the DOJ is saying like, this is very intentional. And this is really just another way to lock users into the iPhone iOS ecosystem. And that it's not just that it's like annoying, it's also that there's just worse functionality when you're doing these, this messaging between iPhone and Android.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  And they even referenced Tim Cook's comment of buy your mom an iPhone where he told someone, you know, oh, someone was complaining at a conference that, you know, his mom, when he's texting with his mom, he's getting green texts. And they said, he just said, buy your mom an iPhone. That was the, that was the solution.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  My hottest take about all of this is that I think that sentence is going to come back to haunt Tim Cook. Like, I think that sentence will haunt Tim Cook, maybe for the rest of his career.

• 26:11Alex Cranz?

  I like when that happened, when we, because it was at Code 2022 and it was Tim Cook, it was Joni Ives, it was Lauren Powell Jobs, they were all hanging out with Kara Swisher, it was her last one. And, and this guy gets up and is like, I can't text my mom. And just there's like a level of almost, I think we talked about it on the show after that. He came off a little smug.

• 26:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Alex Cranz?

  The DOJ noticed.

• 26:36David Pierce?

  I mean, it was a funny line at the time.

• 26:38Alex Cranz?

  It was very funny.

• 26:38David Pierce?

  It played very well in the room, if I remember correctly. But I think like the, I was rereading a bunch of stuff from the Microsoft antitrust trial from whatever 25 years ago. And there was this thing that a Microsoft executive said, I think in an email, I could be wrong, but very early on said something to the effect of, we have to cut off Netscape's air supply. And that phrase became like the mantra of the case that Microsoft is this nefarious company out to destroy anyone who would possibly compete with it and is just going to squeeze everyone to death. I think buy your mom an iPhone is going to do that.

• 27:14Alex Cranz?

  Not barbarians at the gate?

• 27:16David Pierce?

  No, that's like slightly too esoteric, I think.

• 27:19Alex Cranz?

  Which is-

• 27:19David Pierce?

  It's like a cool line. We should, I wrote that line down. We should read it, but.

• 27:24Alex Cranz?

  That line came when they were talking about the super apps. And apparently an Apple exec was like, we can't let the super apps into the United States and onto our platforms. It would be like the barbarians.

• 27:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, so this is from the complaint. It says, as one Apple manager put it, allowing super apps to become the main gateway where people play games, book a car, make payments, et cetera, would quote, let the barbarians in at the gate. Why? Because when a super app offers popular mini programs, iOS stickiness goes down. Like, lesson number one, everybody, don't send emails. But anyway.

• 27:55Alex Cranz?

  That's the first lesson.

• 27:56David Pierce?

  Just send emails to [email protected] with all of your gadget recommendations.

• 28:00Alex Cranz?

  Only emails allowed.

• 28:02David Pierce?

  But no, I think the messaging apps one I thought was both, again, like you're saying, Lauren, the most sort of understandable to the most people, but also maybe the most compelling. If your argument is that Apple is willfully making its products worse to make it harder to leave, like we talked about Beeper a ton on this show earlier this year, right? And the case Beeper-

• 28:21Alex Cranz?

  So did the DOJ.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  So did the DOJ. Yeah, it was in the complaint. Like, there were a few companies that were very clearly being talked about, but didn't get named. Beeper was one of them. There's a section about, you know, a company promising to make the security of the iPhone better for everybody. There was also one about like a company that canceled a smartwatch and it's just like obviously Meta. But anyway. Uh, the Beeper story was essentially they went around all of Apple's systems in order to make your green bubbles blue, even if you're on an Android phone. Apple said, no, it was a whole thing. Everybody listening to the show, I'm sure knows. But what Beeper kept saying is we are making text messaging more secure for iPhone users.

• 29:02David Pierce?

  Because now, instead of using SMS, which is awful technology, bad user experience, and fundamentally insecure, all of those things, undeniably true. Like, if you've ever sent a video over SMS, it sucks and it should not be allowed. And that was the case they kept making, and Apple basically shut it off because they're like, well, we're Apple, we can. And so the DOJ is coming and saying, no, the fact that you are willingly and obviously making your product worse, not just for other people, but for your users, is pretty strong proof that you are not just doing things with your customers in mind.

• 29:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:38David Pierce?

  That if you were, what you would have given them is either access to more messaging tools and competition and let other apps like WhatsApp and whoever else access SMS, which is one of the things that this argues should be allowed. Or you have to actually give your customers the best product available to them. And they have, I mean, there's like this, the famous email from Tim Cook now shooting down the idea of putting iMessage on Android because his argument was that it would be worse for Apple than it would be good to, you know, have this cross-platform stuff.

• 30:09David Pierce?

  Again, like, you just cannot make the argument that that is good for users. You just can't. So you come back from it and say, this is purely monopoly maintenance, to use their term.

• 30:20David Pierce?

  I think this is going to end up being the one we talk about a lot in the course of this trial, personally.

• 30:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's the most indefensible. Apple has never been able to adequately defend this. And they try all the time, right? And every single time, no, I don't think anyone believes them. I, like, I would struggle to think of someone who's like, yeah, Apple has totally got it right. I am totally fine with garbage green bubbles. And if I don't like it, I can go use WhatsApp.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Well, the argument against it is that Apple doesn't have to, right? Like, it's Apple's platform, Apple can do what it wants. And, and then this is like what the DOJ is saying, is they're like, no, actually, that's not how this works. And we're going to prove it in court. And I assume all of Apple's extremely well-paid lawyers are like, Bring it on.

• 31:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the people really winning in this case are the lawyers.

• 31:05David Pierce?

  Oh, as always.

• 31:05Alex Cranz?

  Lot of billable hours coming their way.

• 31:07David Pierce?

  It's gonna be great. All right, let's blow through these last two. And then we need to take a break because this is going to be a 19 hour long first guest. Alex, you want to explain the smartwatches one? That's the next one, Melissa.

• 31:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, smartwatches.

• 31:19David Pierce?

  This one feels easy, actually.

• 31:20Alex Cranz?

  This one is very easy.

• 31:21David Pierce?

  In terms of like, what the problem is?

• 31:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the problem is if you want to have a good smartwatch experience on iOS, you have to have an Apple Watch. There is nothing else. Nothing else competes. And if you want a good smartwatch experience on Android, you would probably want an Apple Watch because it is in fact the best smartwatch right now. And you can't do that either because it's going to be a garbage experience on Android. And it's just that.

• 31:44David Pierce?

  I thought you were about to say you'd found some way to hack an Apple Watch onto Android. And I was like, let's talk about that for a while.

• 31:49Alex Cranz?

  I know, that's next episode.

• 31:53Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, it is very straightforward. It's a crummy experience. And I would have loved if they'd also brought in Bluetooth headphones here because I got a lot of feelings.

• 32:02David Pierce?

  It explicitly mentioned that Bluetooth is bad, which I very much appreciated.

• 32:05Alex Cranz?

  That was nice.

• 32:05David Pierce?

  It's like, if you want to use a non-Apple smartwatch, you have to use Bluetooth. And it just sort of leaves unsaid that like, well, that's a real bummer. But I appreciated that. And it was, yeah, I mean, it was little things that they brought up like, quick responses to messages, which came up like enough times in this complaint that I feel like someone at the DOJ has like a personal issue with not being able to send quick replies.

• 32:25Alex Cranz?

  Someone was using a Pixel Watch with their iPhone and they are pissed.

• 32:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, right? Like, there's some deputy AG somewhere who's like, I just want to send my text messages. What the hell, Apple? It's very strange. But yeah, I mean, that's essentially the crux of it, right, Lauren? That it's like, if you want a good Apple experience, you have to buy an Apple Watch. Which, again, once you bought an Apple Watch, brings you even further into the iPhone ecosystem.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, it just goes back to Apple wanting you to just use Apple products and making it just disincentivizing you, like mixing and matching between Apple products and other products or just switching altogether.

• 33:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, which is, I think, a very funny way of looking at exactly the same thing that Apple has always said, right? Like, Apple, on its face, shouldn't disagree with any of this, right? Like, for Apple to say, like, oh, yeah, the Apple Watch is better if you also have an iPhone. Like, Apple's been making commercials about that for decades. That's the whole pitch, is that, like, we integrate the hardware, the software, and the services so that it's better. Apple's like, yeah, that's the point. And now the DOJ is saying, you know, actually, what you're doing is you're not making it better when those things are together, you're just making everything else worse. And again, this is where I come back to, like, I'm not a lawyer, so don't take any of this seriously. But

• 33:47David Pierce?

  it seems to me that that is a much harder, like, argument to pull and a, like, a string to pull on over the course of a trial.

• 33:55Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's just, it's a major philosophical difference. And it sounds like, I mean, Lauren, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is going to be down to the judge to decide, like, who's right, because both are right. And in the case of vertical integration, vertical integration always makes things much more smooth and seamless. It also makes things much more difficult if you want to change. And we can see that in the healthcare industry, we can see it in a lot of industries, where they say, yeah, we vertically integrated everything. And repeatedly, they've been like, actually, you did too much. There's like, there's some, and we don't know what that line is, but it feels like the courts eventually find it. Is that right, Lauren?

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's basically right. I mean, I think the judge is gonna have to weigh, like, was there a legitimate business reason that Apple did these things? Or, you know, or like, is the effect of these things taken together because of its dominant position in the market, is it too much? And, you know, does it fall into the category of becoming illegal monopolistic behavior?

• 34:58Alex Cranz?

  And that's kind of the key difference here between, like, 2000, when you could only use an iPod on an Apple device. That was because it was fine then because Apple didn't have a huge section of the market for laptops. It didn't have a huge section of any markets, really. And so it was like, OK, cool. You're making new things. You're innovating. And now the difference is that now Apple is huge. Is that right?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And that's why you see Apple saying that they don't think that the US smartphone market is the relevant market. It's really the global smartphone market. And that's really like the go to response in pretty much any monopoly lawsuit is to say like, this is the wrong market. Look at this much bigger market where we're just like a speck on the map.

• 35:45David Pierce?

  Does Apple know that the United States Department of Justice is not like a global organization? Is that? No?

• 35:52Speaker 04

  I believe they're probably aware.

• 35:54David Pierce?

  OK, cool. Just checking. In case you're not, Tim, I know you're listening. Just FYI. That's how that works. All right, one more, and then we should take a break. Alex, you explain this one because you've been sitting at your desk just like muttering about banks all day.

• 36:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:06David Pierce?

  So explain the digital wallets one.

• 36:07Alex Cranz?

  This one, Lauren, like, correct me if I'm wrong. This one was the most surprising one for me, that it popped up here. And then the more I read about it, I was like, oh, someone at the banks was in the Attorney General's ear.

• 36:20David Pierce?

  Do either of you ever spend any time thinking about your digital wallet?

• 36:23Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 36:24David Pierce?

  Like, I feel like on the list of like, things I care about on my phone, I would rank digital wallets so low.

• 36:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I would chase feel that way, or some of the other large banks.

• 36:34David Pierce?

  I don't know.

• 36:35Alex Cranz?

  I think they feel differently. And that's what, that was like me reading between the lines on this part of the complaint. And the complaint is that digital wallets, you can really, can't use any other digital wallet on Apple devices because of how the NFC chip works and how their APIs work. Nothing else works on it. So you have to partner with Apple. You have to pay their fees if you want to do transactions. You basically have to engage with them in the same way that you have to engage with the App Store. And crucially, you have to share data that you might not otherwise share. Both the consumer and the banks have to share data that they wouldn't normally share with Apple in order to make all of this work.

• 37:14David Pierce?

  Well, because Apple's sitting there in the middle.

• 37:16Alex Cranz?

  Right, right. And so the DOJ is basically saying, Apple has inserted itself into this process and is refusing to allow anybody else to do that. And that is wrong. And

• 37:26Alex Cranz?

  Like, I was like, oh, that's, that's, I never thought about that. But yeah, that's because I don't think about my digital wallet because I'm not Chase Bank.

• 37:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 37:33Alex Cranz?

  So, so, and then I was like, yeah, that, that actually makes sense and is probably not great.

• 37:39David Pierce?

  Well, and this is like, the only thing I can think is that every fintech company has been in the DOJ's ear over the last year.

• 37:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  Talking to them about this because part of the point that they're making is that you don't think about your digital wallet because your digital wallet sucks because no one else is allowed to compete with Apple, right?

• 37:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:57David Pierce?

  That if you're, if you want to build some kind of payment product on the iPhone, you are required to integrate it with the Apple Wallet app. You can't use Tap to Pay. You're just hamstrung in all of these ways that actually go out of their way to promote Apple Wallet specifically.

• 38:11Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 38:11David Pierce?

  So if you wanted to do something like, and it actually mentioned, uh, digital car keys as a version of this that has been kind of under innovated as a result because there's no good way to do it.

• 38:20Alex Cranz?

  And they specifically said, they had a bunch of examples, they didn't name names, but they had a bunch of examples of where like app developers and banks and in car companies would just had to give up on developing certain applications and certain, certain features because it wouldn't work with iOS because Apple wouldn't allow it to use the parts of the phone that it would need to make it all work. And like, ooh, that's not a great look for Apple. That's a really bad look.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Uh, you just think of it and this one feels like probably one of the biggest slam dunks, but also the least interesting one for 99.9% of people who don't work at Chase Bank.

• 38:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, this one has the fewest sort of sympathetic victims.

• 39:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:01David Pierce?

  It's like, oh no, poor Goldman Sachs can't do what it wants on the iPhone. That's awful.

• 39:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, and they, they try to make it about the consumer by saying, you know, you have to share this data, you have to share stuff that you wouldn't normally share. And, and that's also true and not great. And I, I loved just, I know we're, we're going to take a break here in a second, but I did love, there was this through line throughout the thing that was like, you know what? Everything Apple says about privacy and security is absolute bullshit. And every single time they are, they are making the privacy and security worse by, by doing this. And that I'm not entirely sure of, right? Because the digital wallet, a big part of that is they've got the secure enclave on the device and they don't want anybody else interacting with that. And that, from a security standpoint, that makes sense. Like, Apple's argument there makes sense. But at the same time.

• 39:50Alex Cranz?

  Green bubbles. There's all these other places where they have made it less secure.

• 39:54David Pierce?

  Right. Even, and I think this is part of what the DOJ is trying to do is that say, even if individually, these things are sort of gross but not illegal, put them all together and it adds up to something bigger. And they had a bunch of other ones. There's like a list at the end of just like all the other crappy things Apple has ever done, which I thought was very funny. And it names, let's see, it names FaceTime, third-party iOS web browsers, eSIMs, cloud storage, iCloud, sales channels, and Siri, which is my favorite.

• 40:27Alex Cranz?

  They dunked on Siri.

• 40:28David Pierce?

  Siri sucks and it's Apple's fault and it's illegal. And I think it's, I think it should be illegal for Siri to be as bad as it is. So I'm in full support of that. Lauren, before we let you go, you've, you've been talking to folks all day. There was a DOJ briefing right after this went out. There was an Apple briefing right after this went out. What's the, what are the vibes like in the hours after this comes out? What are you hearing?

• 40:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I haven't gotten a chance to catch up with too many people yet. But, you know, coming out of the briefing and, you know, just seeing what's out there right now. I think, you know, developers that have been complaining about this for a while are really excited. They're happy to see the US finally take on Apple in this really big way.

• 41:10David Pierce?

  Is this big enough for those people? Like, are they, are they, I feel like a lot of times, folks get mad and they yell and they want big action and then they get small action and they get frustrated. But the little bit that I've heard is folks saying like, this is the big swing we've been waiting for. Is that what you're hearing too?

• 41:26Speaker 04

  I think it's a pretty big case. You know, I think everyone is gonna want to see like their, their little piece of the complaint that they've had for years in this. But I think it's a, it's a pretty sweeping complaint. So I think that a lot of developers will be happy to see this and welcome it. I think, you know, the problem with cases like this and, you know, every antitrust case in the US is that it takes a long time to see them play out. So, you know, I, I think it's gonna be... Maybe a little bit disappointing to people who have wanted to see action for a really long time to see that, you know, it's going to take a while. Um, you know, the DOJ filed

• 42:05Speaker 04

  its first Google lawsuit um back in 2020. It went to trial in 2023. So this is going to take a long time to resolve.

• 42:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right. Before we let you go here and we go take a break, I'm going to put the over under at 2030. Is this resolved before or after? Are we going over or are we under?

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Do we mean like past like exhausting the Supreme Court option and everything?

• 42:28David Pierce?

  The last pieces of paperwork have been filed, whatever that turns out to mean, 2030.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  I think over, but it might be close.

• 42:39David Pierce?

  Okay. Okay. That's good. So I've set the odds correctly. This is, this is good. I feel good about it. All right. All right. We got to take a break. Lauren, thank you so much. We're going to come back and uh just talk more about this. We'll be right back.

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• 44:23David Pierce?

  All right, we're back and we have a guest. Our good friend Vacation Neelai.

• 44:28Speaker 08

  What up?

• 44:29David Pierce?

  Who is a whole other guy than normal Neelai. How you doing, buddy?

• 44:33Speaker 08

  I'm good. I haven't been on vacation like this since 2019 and of course, of course, the DOJ sued Apple for being in Monopoly while I was in the air to Mexico.

• 44:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, there was no chance something was, everything was just gonna be chill for a week while you were gone. Just no chance.

• 44:47Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 44:48David Pierce?

  I assume we're gonna do like four or five emergency broadcasts over the next eight days or so. It's gonna be great.

• 44:53Speaker 08

  Yeah, Tim Cook is gonna overthrow the government real soon. Here's Max. Max is just running around. Hey, Max, come say hi to the rock staff. There she is.

• 45:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, perfect. That's, that's, that's the energy we're looking for from Max. So, we just talked with Lauren. We went through kind of the, the bones of the complaint. We talked about like the five big sections of what's going on. And honestly, I'm just curious for, for Neelai vibes. We have a lot of like legal thinking questions about how this case differs and is similar to some of the old cases we've seen, especially the Microsoft one from, you know, 25 years ago. But I'm sure you read the complaint on the plane, like all cool vacation people. What do you make of it? Where's your head so far?

• 45:30Speaker 08

  So, you know, I interviewed Jonathan Kanter on Decoder a few weeks ago and I asked him about this case and he was very cagey about it. Then my impression of this whole, Jonathan Kanter is the Assistant Attorney General for Anti-Drug Department. He was on station at the time. My read on it is that they are explicitly trying to link Apple to Microsoft in the 90s. Right? They're trying to say there was a big bad in the 90s, there was Microsoft. Microsoft tried to kill Netscape and tried to kill Java and we stopped them from doing that. And that is what let a bunch of other innovative companies do well.

• 46:08David Pierce?

  Including Apple?

• 46:09Speaker 08

  Including, specifically including Apple.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 08

  Right? Microsoft tried to kill QuickTime on Windows. They would, they, they basically nerfed it. Microsoft probably didn't want to let iTunes be a first-class application on Windows. And letting them do that is what let the iPod tick off, right? When they finally were ready to bring the iPod to Windows. So, they're, they're making that comparison very explicitly in the complaint. But then also, I think just from like a vibes perspective, the attitude in the DOJ is... Okay, well, Microsoft itself was built on IBM compatibility, right? Like, there was an IBM platform that allowed Microsoft to go on top of that, okay, Microsoft. We stopped Microsoft from being the big, big bad. That allowed Apple to be a surgeon's guest, but it also created the opportunity for Google to exist, because Google is a browser company.

• 46:58Speaker 08

  The application layer moved from Intel to the web because of the web, and that allowed Google to this. And then they even go so far as to, you know, when you, when you hear them make the argument, they're like, and then Amazon was built on top of Google, which is... Yeah. Yeah, that's a theory.

• 47:16Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 47:16Speaker 08

  But the idea that people were searching for products and they landed on Amazon, and Amazon became the best retailer because they had the most selection. Their, their point is the natural evolution of technology is for one platform to provide a boost to the next one, and for people to move sort of like higher and higher up levels of attraction. And what Apple has done is they've basically forbidden that from happening. So if you think, like, they keep talking about super apps in the complaint. Um, the comparison that they, they make, I think they were gonna make it more loudly. Um, in the Windows case, they called it middleware, which is a deeply funny word. Mm-hmm. And I think they were gonna try to use that word again, and it's still in this complaint a little bit. But the idea is like, uh, Java was middleware on Windows.

• 47:59Speaker 08

  So you don't have to write to Windows, you can write to Java, and you could deploy an app anywhere. Uh, you don't have to write to Windows, you can write to the web, and you can deploy anywhere. Flash is a type of middleware, which the people are gonna have a lot of feelings on. But Apple has basically forbidden all of these things from being actual competitors to running natively on their phone. Uh, so like, web apps are not a good competitor for real apps on a phone. Even though they were intended to be in the beginning, if you remember Steve Jobs, fucking sweet swooping. Yeah. And I, I think people have a lot of feelings about that, like, on both sides, right? Uh, and I think they went away from like web apps to middleware to super apps. Uh, and here's my hottest take, I think they're talking about super apps some, uh, because they know Elon Musk wants X to be a super app.

• 48:42Speaker 08

  And so if they get Elon Musk to say Apple's a monopoly, like that's good for them.

• 48:46David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 48:47Speaker 08

  That's just like, that's two peanut lies, man. That's, that's just me staring at the ocean and being like, why do we keep talking about super apps? It's to get Elon to tweet about it.

• 48:56David Pierce?

  I love the political theory that getting Elon on your side is, is the surest way to winning in the courts right now.

• 49:03Speaker 08

  It sure is. If you think maybe Trump might win, right?

• 49:07David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 49:08Speaker 08

  If you think Trump is trying to woo Elon and you think there might be a change of regime at the Department of Justice, you, you probably want this to appear to be really bipartisan. You probably want to say the richest man, the most innovative, triangle car man in the world, uh, thinks that's a good idea because then he can make the super app that, uh, all innovative guys who do nearly can funnel and robots want to do. I don't know. Like, I think that's a better argument politically than web app could be as powerful as made about, which is, I, I, which is what I believe, but I don't, yeah, I'm not Elon.

• 49:45Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's probably part of the reason that the digital wallet stuff is in here. It's because you, it is bipartisan. Like, the banks want, want to get rid of that. They, they want to be able to put their own wallets on the phone and, and now the, the DOJ is saying, yeah, we want you to do that, too.

• 50:02Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 50:02David Pierce?

  Also, just in case you were wondering, Elon Musk has tweeted twice today about the woke mind virus and zero times about Apple and the DOJ. So, not great so far.

• 50:12Speaker 08

  Yeah. Look, the man does not love, does not love a government regulator. They're not his favorite. But I'm just saying, like, if you can use some vocabulary that is more popular over there in crazy town, you're, you're better off than talking about middleware or whatever nonsense they were going to talk about before. I also think, yeah, there's, I think Apple's response to this is like, fair. They're like, this is our business model. We make products that work really well together. I'm sorry if Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk are mad at us. Like, we stand between you and the, you know, capricious, avaricious banks. Like, that's a pretty good argument. I, I don't, I'm not sitting here being like, man, I wish I could deal with my bank more directly.

• 50:54Speaker 08

  I do think there's like a political coalition that they're trying to make out of it.

• 50:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, we were talking a little bit about this with Lauren in the last segment, but the the fact that what Apple is being accused of is the same thing that Apple has always said that it does, which is build hardware, software and services that work best together. And so like the argument that the Apple Watch is the best way to use a smartwatch with an iPhone, like every single person at Apple Park is like, yep, that's right. And it's just a question. And I feel like this, this to me reminds me a little bit of like, when I was at the Google antitrust trial and they were arguing about basically Google's bigness and why Google has so much market share. And Google was like, no, it's because we're very good and we make good products. And the government was like, well,

• 51:42David Pierce?

  no. And it just like that proving the opposite of that point seems very difficult to me in a way that like, the DOJ set itself up with this really interesting narrative that kind of starts at the iPhone isn't very good and ends at monopoly. And I think you can sort of get there, but it just seems to me that like legally speaking, jump like proving the case from hoop to hoop there seems very complicated.

• 52:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, I don't know that they start with the iPhone isn't very good. I think they're more or less like, the iPhone's great. And we have all of this evidence that Apple actually doesn't feel any competitive pressure on the iPhone.

• 52:21David Pierce?

  Right. But I think but part of that is Apple saying the iPhone is not as good as it could be. That like what they're saying is your experience would be better if there was more competitive, if there was more competition in this space.

• 52:30Speaker 08

  Right. Even so, we don't have all the evidence. They haven't seen all it sounds like there's just like oceans of Apple that's over here. Right. Like that exists. Yeah. It's gonna be good.

• 52:41Speaker 08

  And but even in this complaint, there's the marketing manager for the iPhone saying, we made the phone too good. Like the features are good enough already. We didn't have to put more expense into the phone. We made the phone too good. We should, especially the features are going to be expensive. I think the quote is like, we should challenge expensive features going into the consumer phone.

• 53:00David Pierce?

  Right. Because like it would be good enough today, what we did a while ago. Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 08

  Right, like we were making things better for no reason. That's bad, right? What you want is Apple saying Samsung is on our ass. Like Lenovo is on our ass, whoever, like Motorola, right?

• 53:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 08

  And we should make the phone as good as possible to win market share, otherwise people will switch. And the argument that the DOJ is making, again, comes back to just like, where is the application layer? Because the application layer moves up one level to super apps or the web. Instantly, the iPhone gets disintermediated and they have to compete. And this is, by the way, exactly what happened to Windows. I, we just had Dylan Field that's out by Southwest with us talking about Figma. And he was like, the app, the best way to deploy applications to desktop computers today is the web.

• 53:50David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 53:50Speaker 08

  Right? No one writes native Windows binaries, not you're writing games or you need some other specific, very specific access to the hardware, which some, some people do. I'm not saying it's completely dead. But there's a reason that like Windows apps are the hotness. Desktop apps all, right? Like, um, there's a reason Windows apps are the hotness. Web apps all, and they all live in the cloud and some of them have data access, like Big One does a lot of cool stuff in WebAssembly.

• 54:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean Electron is like the new middleware, right? Like it is, it is a thing that lets you run, write one app that runs lots and lots of places.

• 54:21Speaker 08

  And people can have a lot of feelings about like Electron is not great and a lot of like, Electron destroys your computer and like they're trying to get better, but all that means is in particular for Apple, when the application layer moved to the web, they were able to ship the iMac and take market share away from Windows. And that is, that, right, that created the opportunity for Apple to exist. And so if the DOJ is basically saying, look, Apple is restricting the natural evolution of technology and they're not letting the application layer move to super apps or the web or wherever, AI, wherever it might go. And that means the next generation of computers is not forming. And here's the evidence, which is Apple is artificially keeping the price of the phone high and they're not trying very hard.

• 55:04Speaker 08

  And here's some quotes in the complaint where they're explicitly not trying very hard. They gotta prove all this. This is a complaint.

• 55:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 55:11Speaker 08

  But I see the argument because it is exactly the argument that allowed the iMac to exist.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  Well, and to that point, like, Apple understands better than anybody the consequences of this, because Apple exists because of those consequences, right? Like, it is, I think, the, the, basically, like, the Microsoft antitrust trial led to the success of the iPod is like a slightly wild take.

• 55:34Speaker 08

  I think that's going too far. I, I, I think it led to the success of the web, which allowed the iMac business.

• 55:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I think that's a better argument, but the complaint says the iPod did it.

• 55:43Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's, it's going, the complaint says the iPod because they wanted to connect QuickTime, where they had all these quotes from Apple executives talking about QuickTime and how it was hindered on, on Windows. So, like, that, they had, they wanted to stay in theme and reuse Apple quotes to be like, "Yeah, suck it, Apple."

• 56:02Speaker 08

  Right, and all those people are like, rich or gone. It doesn't matter. But that thing, like, I, I, I just, we've talked enough about, like, in many ways, the complaint reads like a Vercast episode.

• 56:13David Pierce?

  It kind of does.

• 56:14Speaker 08

  It's like fascinating to me. It's like green bubbles and like NFC access. It's very wonky. Like, I, you know, I, I did just spend an hour with Danter on a stage. Like, the dude is a nerd. We, he, I think he gets it. In a way that, you know, I think it's, it's very tempting to say, "I don't want to do New York City on my computers." Like, like, I spent some time with him recently. I, I think he gets it. I think the point he's trying to make is, like, over and over again, what happens in technology is the application layer moves up one level of abstraction. I'll give you an example that's totally unrelated. This is more Pino Quata thoughts, indeed. But I'll give you more, one more example that's totally unrelated to this.

• 56:57Speaker 08

  Jensen Huang from Nvidia, like, he just on stage said, "I don't think people are gonna have to know how to code anymore, because they'll just tell the AI what to do, and the AI will generate applications for them." That's a huge step up in levels of abstraction. It's massively inefficient to say, "I will no longer know how to program a computer." I will... Tell a data center full of Nvidia GPUs to write programs for another computer. Like massively inefficient. But that's everyone believes in. And I, I, I, I think if you believe that is the arc of technology, then you, you, it's hard to look at the iPhone and say, well, where are the really interesting electron-ish apps?

• 57:40Speaker 08

  Where are the really interesting super apps in this country? We have had our coverage of super apps are coming on the word for five years. Like ever since anybody woke up and saw WeChat in China. Uh, and said, oh, look, the Chinese market, there's a lot of switching between phones. It was like, it's a more vibrant market over there in smartphones. Because this one app is actually the operating system.

• 58:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 58:02Speaker 08

  Why doesn't that kind of thing happen? It's not that Google doesn't want that to exist. It's not that Meta wouldn't do that tomorrow with Facebook. It's that Apple is basically, so they can't.

• 58:11David Pierce?

  I mean, that's functionally what Facebook has been trying to do for a decade now is, is build more and more of that stuff in. And ironically, on the web, for a long time, it worked really well. And then, and this is, we were talking about the, the super app thing and whether it's like a function of the way Apple works or just a genuine cultural difference. And this hadn't occurred to me until now, but I think maybe the best argument you could make for why it's just a cultural difference is that everybody hated when Facebook got really cluttered.

• 58:36Speaker 08

  Oh, my.

• 58:36David Pierce?

  Like ran away from the app. And, and Facebook like pretty nakedly and loudly like tried to learn from WeChat and just pull more and more of that in. And it got messy and it got weird and it got complicated. And then, you know, politics happened and people started to like flee Facebook. But still people use Marketplace and groups and like Facebook is in a very real way. A super app, it is the closest thing we have in the United States to a super app.

• 59:00Speaker 08

  Yeah. But it's not close enough. It's not.

• 59:02David Pierce?

  No, and it can't do it on mobile.

• 59:04Speaker 08

  Right, it's not, I do everything in this app. So I can switch to a Samsung phone or whatever kind of other phone, a Pixel. And basically recreate my experience. And the point is, if you could, if you can switch your services or you can switch your application environment easily, you'll be very likely to switch your hardware. Yeah. And the, there's a line in the complaint that another Apple quote. This is the one that led me to believe there's a mountain of evidence in this case. Um, where it's an email from an unnamed Apple executive who says, if we let this cloud stuff happen, anyone can just buy a $25 Android and have a great experience.

• 59:40David Pierce?

  He said bucks and spelled bucks with an X, which I hate so much.

• 59:45Speaker 08

  Uh, and I believe he said that that's the barbarians at the gate.

• 59:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's pretty good.

• 59:51Speaker 08

  Right. And that's like, Apple like openly being afraid of Android in that way, not because it's better, but because it's deeper and saying, we have to make sure it's not a good experience over there. Not by making our phone great, but by letting, making sure that application developers can't do things over there that can be here. Or making sure that if they do things over here, it's costly, like cloud gaming, right? I think that was the example there. If we allow cloud gaming, anyone can buy a cheap Android phone and have a great experience. So they'll just be cloud gaming. That's bad. Like, I can't stress enough how bad that is. And again, I'll come back to Figma just because we had Dylan on the show recently. I know a lot of designers who have given up their MacBooks because they spend all day using Figma on a Chromebook.

• 1:00:37Speaker 08

  And then they, you know, they allocate their dollars elsewhere. That's fascinating. It's just a fascinating turn of events that has happened in that market. It's crazy that nothing has gotten in between the phone. Now, just for the sake of the argument, I will make all of Apple's arguments without having really read their responses. Because again, I'm going to take them.

• 1:00:56David Pierce?

  They are what you think they are. I'll tell you that. Like there was, there's, they, they did a background briefing with a bunch of reporters and have put out a couple of statements and nothing in it will remotely surprise you.

• 1:01:05Speaker 08

  None of it. Yeah, I, I do love that the briefing was on background, by the way. Um, we're mad, said no one.

• 1:01:13Speaker 08

  Cool. Anyhow, uh, I'm guessing they're like, the security is really important. These things are in pockets all the time. Um, we crap, uh, integration of hardware, software and services and no else does. Like, that's actually the business, not the other stuff.

• 1:01:28David Pierce?

  That is alarmingly close. Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 08

  Sure. Right. Yeah, but we've covered this company for a long time. And then I'm wondering if they brought up battery life, because that, that's the one to me that's like, uh, our producer Liam was just at my house and we were on a Google meet with my 2015 iMac. And he was like, what's that noise? And I was like, that's the iMac. That's the fans from the iMac trying to run this web app right now. And he was like, I thought that was your furnace.

• 1:01:55Alex Cranz?

  It was your 2015 iMac.

• 1:01:59Speaker 08

  There are a lot of arguments, especially on a mobile phone, power constraints, small device, blah, blah, blah, network constraints, where you want to be in tight control of what an application can do. I totally, I totally buy it. I don't think those arguments are wrong. I just think Apple probably, ever since Tim Cook said, like, services revenue, Paul, five years ago, has been actively protecting the business as opposed to growing it. And I think there, I think there's a bunch of evidence to that, to that effect.

• 1:02:30Alex Cranz?

  So, Apple didn't mention battery life on super apps, instead, all on background again. So, we don't know who actually said any of this. Maybe it wasn't even Apple, maybe it was Orange. But, but they said that super apps exist already and, and that anything they do is for privacy and security reasons, which is the big theme.

• 1:02:49Speaker 08

  What two countries did they call up super apps and things in? China and India.

• 1:02:55Alex Cranz?

  Yep. WeChat and Tata.

• 1:02:56Speaker 08

  Right. So, two countries that regulate the shit out of Apple. Yep. I just want to be blunt, like, China basically is like, you're gonna give our user data to the state. And China, and Apple's like, cool. China, from John Gruber, I think, reported this, China's the one that said, you're gonna do RCS, and Apple finally caved.

• 1:03:19Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:03:19Speaker 08

  Probably for bad reasons, right? I think China wants Apple to move to RCS, so people will stop using encrypted ID card, or I must have. Yeah. That's bad, but they're gonna do it. India also extraordinarily interested in regulating Apple. Also, I don't know if you saw the pictures of Rihanna performing at a wedding in India lately, Vakesh Ambani's son's wedding. Vakesh Ambani owns Reliance Jio, the largest carrier in India. He's a major benefactor of the government. And when the wireless carrier in India says, we want to make sure people can switch easily, Apple gives up. Right. And like, that's a big thing. My favorite fact about the Indian smartphone market is there are like 10 phone launches a week? Or some insane number like that?

• 1:04:01David Pierce?

  That's the dream.

• 1:04:02Speaker 08

  Because people are switching, people are switching so hard all over the place. Because the application layer, the network layer is actually to some extent on reliance. Like reliance via the network is actually the application layer there, which is utterly fascinating. So I would just point out, like, Apple saying it's super app exists and not mentioning that in the two countries that regulates Apple the hardest in various ways is pretty funny. Man, it's a, it appears to be on background. So we don't even know. If someone whispered this.

• 1:04:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 08

  In a meeting and no one was allowed to ask that person, who knows?

• 1:04:33Alex Cranz?

  I fell asleep and I woke up and had these arguments in my head.

• 1:04:35David Pierce?

  And I knew it in my head. Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  Neil, why do you think they didn't talk about the web more in this complaint? The, the, the thing that surprised me the most was that all of the arguments that we've been talking about on the Vergecast for months now about what the open web could be, like, I just imagine Dieter Bone reading this and like screaming about progressive web apps. And he's like, this solves all problems. The Palm Pre knew it. Everything would have been great. But the open web wasn't really a thing. Like, they didn't talk about web browsers, except sort of obliquely. There were not big discussions about what web apps could do to make these things better. Like, why, what's your read on why that was not part of this complaint?

• 1:05:14Speaker 08

  Well, and I texted Dieter today and I said, I miss you. The United States government says web apps are important.

• 1:05:22Speaker 08

  He was just like, go on vacation.

• 1:05:25David Pierce?

  He texted you back from messages.google.com, the web app.

• 1:05:28Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 1:05:32Speaker 08

  So yeah, good call out there. Um, I, again, I, I think this is a political situation. I, I think that that stuff is in there. I, I know for a fact the DOJ has been paying a lot of attention to Apple's compliance, the DMA in Europe, and their move to, you know, disallow web apps. And then like bring them back because the regulator sleeps out. By the way, that web app thing, you know, I'm not a crypto person, but there was a huge freak out because there are crypto apps that store, that are web apps that store the data locally. And Apple was going to wipe out people's wallets by disallowing web apps. So they were just going to get rid of the functionality.

• 1:06:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, literally the, the local data on their phone that was stored there with their money would have just been gone. Insane.

• 1:06:18Speaker 08

  Which is, I mean, hilarious. So I know the DOJ has been paying a lot of attention to what I'm thinking there. I really think this comes down to who is the audience for this, for this complaint. I was talking to Sarah John about it. This complaint is the press release. It's fundamentally, it's written like a press release. It's a story. It begins with like Steve Jobs in media red, like doing a thing. And it's like, it's a story.

• 1:06:42David Pierce?

  It starts with a Kindle ad, like truly, what a win for the Kindle today.

• 1:06:48David Pierce?

  The Kindle is the bastion of openness.

• 1:06:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, and I think telling people the web apps are gonna do it on a phone. It's like, people know what websites look like on a phone. We have the only good ones. The only good ones.

• 1:07:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is.

• 1:07:04Speaker 08

  All the rest of them are trying to mug you in a dark alley. I think they had to move on and say like, there's a next generation of products that's being held back. By the way, Elon Musk, proprietor of Triangle Cars, wants to build one right now, doesn't he? And I think that's a much better story. It's a story about the future and it's a story about the past. But I think fundamentally, you know, the recent history of technology suggests the web is actually the best application.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 08

  It distributes itself widely and it has, in fact, taken over on desktop. Like in a real way, a lot of the native apps that you think you're using on a Mac or PC are in fact electronics.

• 1:07:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:07:43Speaker 08

  They're just wrappers around web apps.

• 1:07:45David Pierce?

  I've been covering browsers more in the last 12 months than I have in like the previous decade. Because again, the layer of applications is moving and all these browsers are starting to realize like, oh, your operating system isn't actually the place that can do all the stuff for you online. It's your browser.

• 1:08:02Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  So we're going to give you more cross-platform tools. We're going to rethink the way extensions work. Arc is one of a bunch of browsers doing a bunch of interesting stuff with AI. And so like, that's the same sort of layer of app abstraction that you're talking about. And it's making browsers, at least on desktops, like really interesting and important again.

• 1:08:21Alex Cranz?

  It's all about Microsoft Edge.

• 1:08:23David Pierce?

  Well, and even again, like Microsoft now is like, Edge is a crucially important thing to Microsoft in a way that like, remember the last time browsers were important to Microsoft?

• 1:08:34Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's for 2040. 2040, Microsoft Edge is gonna be a horrible monopoly. Just you wait.

• 1:08:42David Pierce?

  That's a good take. I appreciate that.

• 1:08:44Speaker 08

  I mean, this is just a circle of life, right?

• 1:08:47Speaker 08

  I would just like your thing I would say is like a bunch of these quote unquote middle way of thinking of it was like did turn out to be garbage. Like Java did not turn out to be an excellent application environment. And Flash, I think someone famously was a piece of crap. But if you don't allow the things to like take hold in the market, then you are going to be stuck with one vendor kind of controlling everything. And I, I, I wonder how much of a thought gun approach this complaint is. And it's everything. It's I'm actually just applications, it's super apps, it's wallets, it's a smart watch, it's everything. And I wonder how much of this is like, let's put it out there so people grab on to and then follow up on that one.

• 1:09:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Alex Cranz?

  How much of the case when it finally goes is just going to be spicy Apple quotes and then being like, look how spicy this is, destroy them.

• 1:09:38Speaker 08

  Yeah. I think what we've learned from all of these recently is there's nothing more fun than putting a powerful executive on a stand and reading their emails to them.

• 1:09:49Speaker 08

  You read this email, they're not certain, like I don't recall. That's pretty good. Like, I'll watch that.

• 1:09:55David Pierce?

  We have seen a lot of that.

• 1:09:56Speaker 08

  The thing I warn everybody is the Microsoft case in the 90s took a decade, right? It was like three or four years in trial and three or four years of appeal and I got kicked back. Then there was a settlement. At one point, I have this very distinct memory of standing in a Target in Racine, Wisconsin as like a child, teenager, reading the Newsweek that was describing how Microsoft had been split up into something called Appsco and OSco.

• 1:10:25David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:10:26Speaker 08

  Because they were going to split Windows from the application business. I don't know why this happened in a Target in Racine. I mean, I know why I was in Racine, Wisconsin, which I grew up. But I don't know why this memory is specific to standing in a Target reading Newsweek print. But it is. That's what I got for you. I can't remember anyone's names. I remember that. That's who I am.

• 1:10:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, you go.

• 1:10:44Speaker 08

  And like, it got all the way to the DOJ is going to break up Microsoft. It came all the way back down. And that took 10 years. And, and so I think this is a decade, but this is a gravitational well that will last a decade. Like, the entire industry is going to bend around this case for a decade.

• 1:11:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, we, we gave Lauren the over under of 2030. Uh, and for this to be like, fully all the way done and dusted. And she sort of gently took the over. It sounds like you're, you're like hard over on 2030.

• 1:11:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, unless, uh,

• 1:11:18Speaker 08

  I think the only difference to me in my mind is the, the DNA exists in the EU now and Apple's making these changes anyway. And so it's going to collect some data about how much money it can make in the meantime. And what that would be like here. And so there, there's a possibility that, that breaks this case and makes it a shorter. But they're mad. Like, this is a company that is idealistically, ideologically upset if the note thing, but we can't do whatever it wants. Uh, and I get it. Like, I, I don't like being told what to do.

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  No one does.

• 1:11:50Speaker 08

  Anyone has ever noticed, but I think in this case, like, again, I, to some extent, this complaint reads like a Virg cast. It's like, why, why, why did it take so long for Apple to allow gamers to run the app on their iPhone? Oh, because they want to protect the app store.

• 1:12:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:12:04Speaker 08

  It's as simple as that.

• 1:12:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, one more thing, and then we should let you go because you have many more pina coladas to drink. Um.

• 1:12:11Speaker 08

  So many.

• 1:12:12David Pierce?

  How do you feel?

• 1:12:12Speaker 08

  So many. I'm never coming home.

• 1:12:14David Pierce?

  That's good. This is, Mexico Neelai is going to be a whole new addition to the Virg cast. I love this. Uh, talk to me about how you feel about this, like, as a, as a lawyer who would have to argue this case. Because one of the things Alex and I have been arguing about all day is, my feeling is that one of the big things that happened in the Microsoft case was that you had Netscape, which was this, like, one party that had been, like, viciously, loudly wronged. And it actually ended up not being the most important part of that case, but it was like, it was a very helpful victim that you could argue, this is the bad thing that was done to someone and it crushed them. And, and maybe it's just too early to know the answer to this question, but My argument has been that there isn't a version of that in this complaint.

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  Alex's response, which I think is fair, is that basically the victim in this is us, the people who use these devices. But like, if you were a lawyer standing up in front of people trying to argue this case, how does it feel to you from seeing the complaint? It, in terms of just like handicapping your chances of being able to prove this in court?

• 1:13:17Speaker 08

  Uh, I, I wish I knew what evidence they were sitting on. What I would say is, and that's it was a very convenient victim because it was the web. It represented the thing that people liked. Here's the exciting new thing. Like, why are you getting on the internet to use this? And Microsoft wants to crush it and own it. And that's a good story to tell. Um, I think in this case, it's much more like, look at Apple looking at any threats to its business and sending emails saying, we can't let that happen. Look at Apple saying, we cannot allow people to buy cheaper things.

• 1:13:53Speaker 08

  I, you know, we, we've talked a lot, talking about, about like theories of antitrust law on this go. And like Lina Khan trying to change them from like the consumer welfare standard to blob, you know, like all this stuff. And one thing that's really notable about this complaint is there's no esoteric new antitrust neo Brandeisian. It's Apple kept prices high. That's the argument.

• 1:14:17David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:14:17Speaker 08

  Apple won't, by, by not allowing these new application models to take hold, Apple gets to keep the price of iPhone high. And I think that actually, that's what I would focus on, is you don't need this. Right? Like the Gmail app runs everywhere. Why doesn't Xbox run everywhere? Well, it's because Apple won't let it. Like, what are the number of things we can see in this industry? That basically don't happen because Apple won't let that happen on the iPhone or like for a lot of things, like blogging on the app. There's a lot. And I, I think the funny thing is all those victims are also companies the DOJ is suing. Like, like, Google is like writing out lists of the bear villain. Meta is in that list, bear villain.

• 1:14:59Speaker 08

  So I think it's gonna be much more about painting Apple as a villain rather than trying to find a victim.

• 1:15:04Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:15:04David Pierce?

  That's good. I like it. All right, Neelai, go have vacation. Uh, I will see you presumably like Monday morning when something else insane happens. The three of us will be back in here doing this.

• 1:15:15Speaker 08

  If, if I come back, just get ready for the hand. Get ready for this pale, pale human being to be gone, replaced by a happy, healthy, extremely, extremely hammered, you know, the dog.

• 1:15:29David Pierce?

  We love it. Thanks, buddy. We'll see you later. All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and Alex and I are gonna do an actual lightning round for once. Because holy God, have we been talking a long time. We'll be right back.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

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• 1:17:12David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. We're gonna do an actual lightning round. Because Neelai's not here, so we can do this quickly, as we like to do from time to time. Neelai, by the way, if you see him on the beach somewhere in Mexico, pour him a tequila shot. He'll like that very much.

• 1:17:26Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:17:27David Pierce?

  All right, let's do, we're gonna do two things each, because there's been a lot of like little news. So let's just bounce through some of it and then we'll get out of here. You go first. What do you got?

• 1:17:33Alex Cranz?

  All right, first up, YouTube is bringing their multi-view that they do for sports and stuff. They're bringing it to the iPad and iOS, which is very exciting.

• 1:17:42David Pierce?

  Oh wait, really?

• 1:17:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43David Pierce?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:17:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45David Pierce?

  I think one of the hot takes I've developed recently is that split screen is a thing that should exist in every app on every device for everything all the time.

• 1:17:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:17:54David Pierce?

  Like, the more I use it on like the Samsung phones or the Pixels where they're getting better at sort of letting you drag apps up and down, it's just great.

• 1:18:02Alex Cranz?

  It's such a-

• 1:18:02David Pierce?

  And all the arguments, like, "Oh, the screen's too small, you don't..." No, screw that. My phone's enormous. Let me look at two apps.

• 1:18:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They aren't the only ones doing multi-view. The other multi-view news this week was from Peacock, which is gonna be doing multi-view of up to four streams for the Olympics. And then they are planning to have that stick around for sports, maybe even like scripted content, so you can watch Below Deck on like four streams at once if you wanted to, theoretically. And that's, I wouldn't want to.

• 1:18:29David Pierce?

  So, there's this sports podcast I listen to, shout out to the Bill Simmons podcast. And he always talks about being able to watch basketball on one screen and movies on another screen. And his argument is essentially, if he like looks over at the movie and it's a good part, he'll flip the volume to that and just like watch it for a few minutes, or if the game goes to commercials. And I used to think that was ridiculous, and now every single time he mentions it, I'm like, "God, that sounds awesome." Like, one thing hits commercials, you just flip to the other one. Go back and forth. You're like, "Oh, well, I don't care about the next five minutes of this. I'm gonna watch 10 minutes of The Godfather." Like, that rules.

• 1:19:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the cool dads in the 90s, they just did that. They just had like picture-in-picture. And for some reason, computers were like, "We can do that, but we're not gonna."

• 1:19:12David Pierce?

  Or the back button on a TV remote. A plus choice. Yeah, YouTube TV should have this, but they should have it for everything.

• 1:19:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19David Pierce?

  I should just be able to have four screens of whatever the hell I want to watch at any time.

• 1:19:22Alex Cranz?

  And Peacock, important, it's going to work on everywhere. So it's not just going to, it's going to work on the apps. It's going to work on the smart TV. Like they're rolling it out across the board.

• 1:19:30David Pierce?

  Can I say I love that you're a Peacock convert?

• 1:19:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm a Peacock convert.

• 1:19:33David Pierce?

  We should disclose here now, NBC Universal, which is a division of Comcast, is a minority investor in Vox Media. Neelai will happily come home from Mexico and tell you that he executive produced a show for Netflix called The Future of It's very good. Everybody should watch it. Alex loves Peacock now.

• 1:19:49Alex Cranz?

  Apparently, yeah.

• 1:19:50David Pierce?

  I have always loved Peacock. You think Netflix is going to die, which is weird.

• 1:19:54Alex Cranz?

  It's on a 40. It's on 40.

• 1:19:56David Pierce?

  That's probably good. That's enough for a disclosure.

• 1:19:57Alex Cranz?

  That's enough. I didn't say 90. Like, it's going to die eventually. Everything does.

• 1:20:01David Pierce?

  It's beautiful. All right. My first one is, which one of these do I want to do first? Let's talk about Beeper. So we mentioned Beeper a few minutes ago as one of the apps that has actually become like embroiled in this whole Apple antitrust saga. Gave up on the idea of trying to replace iMessage, which, good idea. Someday you might be able to, but that's a very long time from now. And it's just back to building like a kick-ass cross-platform messaging app, which rules. They just rolled out a new app for Android in, I think it's in public beta now.

• 1:20:32Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:20:32David Pierce?

  It's really good.

• 1:20:33Alex Cranz?

  Is it?

• 1:20:33David Pierce?

  It's like, the thing that they got back to, which I appreciate, is they're like, what if we just took Signal and WhatsApp and your Instagram DMs and LinkedIn? And X, I think still works, even though that API has been weird. I could be wrong. I'm not sure. I haven't used X in a long time, so don't believe anything I say about X. But basically, all the messages you get and just sort of put them all into one organizable inbox that makes sense. Which, with or without SMS and iMessage, terrifically used as a service.

• 1:21:01Alex Cranz?

  I want that.

• 1:21:01David Pierce?

  And the app is, has always been like a little funky at times.

• 1:21:06Alex Cranz?

  A little janky?

• 1:21:07David Pierce?

  It's, it's sort of just built on a series of elaborate hacks.

• 1:21:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11David Pierce?

  But they're getting very good at it now, and the new app is really nice. So if you use Beeper and are on Android, it rules. And it is the rare app that is way better on Android than on iOS. So for all the Android-using Verge staffers and Vergecast listeners, this is a victory.

• 1:21:25Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry. I'm going to wait till 2030. Maybe 2032, it sounds like. And, and I'll have this app too.

• 1:21:31David Pierce?

  There you go. Dude, the messaging app is about to get, or the messaging app world in general is about to get real weird.

• 1:21:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36David Pierce?

  WhatsApp is doing the thing where it's interoperating. The EU is forcing everybody to interoperate. Like, it's gonna get very strange, but I think in mostly really good ways. You're gonna be able to just like get all your messages all to places, which is how this should have worked forever.

• 1:21:49Alex Cranz?

  So the 2002 is gonna come back, but instead of like Adium and whatever the Windows version of that was called, it started with a T.

• 1:21:56David Pierce?

  Trillion.

• 1:21:57Alex Cranz?

  Trillion, that was it.

• 1:21:58David Pierce?

  There was also Pidgin.

• 1:21:59Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  Which I loved. Yeah.

• 1:22:00Alex Cranz?

  It's good.

• 1:22:01David Pierce?

  Inject all those apps back into my veins. Let's go.

• 1:22:04Alex Cranz?

  Right into your veins.

• 1:22:04David Pierce?

  All right, what's your second one?

• 1:22:05Alex Cranz?

  Okay, my second one is, Alison wrote a really cute piece this week, and it just felt appropriate. We talk so much about super apps. I kinda think Sago Mini is like a super app, but for babies.

• 1:22:18David Pierce?

  Now we're talking. Tell me so much more.

• 1:22:22Alex Cranz?

  Well, you know, she, she, she was like, she compared it to, to like Blippi, but not Blippi. She was just like, it gives a bunch of little games that kids can play. It's all in one place. They're all like good games for small children, for babies. Cause she has a baby. Two years of babies, right?

• 1:22:40David Pierce?

  You said "super app for babies", and I started imagining like my 15-month-old son running around being like, "I got Goodnight Moon in here. I got a bunch of trucks in here. Ah, sick, Honey and Cheerios. Got that in here." It's like, I can message my mom.

• 1:22:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:54David Pierce?

  Rules, I'm into this.

• 1:22:55Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's not quite there yet. I don't know if that's their...

• 1:22:58David Pierce?

  That's 2.0.

• 1:22:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but, yeah, I don't know if that's actually their ambitions, but it's mainly...

• 1:23:02David Pierce?

  They feature Cheerios.

• 1:23:04Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's a lot of structured games, and it's for, it's for really small children instead of, because like, if you go on YouTube, if you go to, to the App Store and you try to find games for babies, you will have a time.

• 1:23:18David Pierce?

  Oh, it's a mess.

• 1:23:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19David Pierce?

  It's a total mess. And I will say, this is, I'm, I'm glad you brought this up because we get a surprising amount of emails and calls to the hotline. Basically all asking variations of the same question, which is just like, what do I do with my kid on screens and devices and computers? Cause we're like, at this point where, when kids are like, I don't know, eight, you have to start having like a really real series of complicated conversations about like what it means to use the internet. Younger than that, it's just like... I'm just gonna plant you in front of something and something's gonna happen. But this question of like, is YouTube Kids a safe place to be is increasingly kind of fraught? Because there's all kinds of weird stuff on YouTube Kids.

• 1:23:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it gets weird.

• 1:24:00David Pierce?

  And like, there's been this stuff recently with AI-generated videos going in front of kids that is spooking a lot of people, I think for totally good reasons. So there's this sense of like, what is the right call here? And we're having all these complicated discussions about screen time and what it means to be put in front of these devices. And so for stuff like this, that's just like, cool, silly, low stakes, fun stuff.

• 1:24:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21David Pierce?

  There's so little of that in the world right now.

• 1:24:24Alex Cranz?

  Honestly, I wish I'd known about this before all of this. Because when I saw my godson recently, I was like, I don't know what to do. And like, pulled up one of those videos where like, the squirrel eats nuts that's supposed to distract cats. And I was like, does this work for a six-year-old? It doesn't.

• 1:24:39David Pierce?

  I bet it doesn't. I will say, I found an hour-long video that's just people feeding red pandas. And you know who that super worked for is both me and my son. We sat like, wrapped in front of that thing for an entire hour.

• 1:24:53Alex Cranz?

  Like, you watch those animals eat and you're like, wow, look at them go!

• 1:24:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Alex Cranz?

  That's great, I wanted to do that.

• 1:24:57David Pierce?

  It was so good.

• 1:24:58Alex Cranz?

  That was so nice.

• 1:24:58David Pierce?

  I have no notes. My son's also very into trains right now. So we just watch a lot of videos. I just wanna say, there is a man on the internet who just makes hour-long videos of trains.

• 1:25:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11David Pierce?

  And it just cuts from train to train, and he travels the world and does all the trains. His name is Mike something, and I love him.

• 1:25:19Alex Cranz?

  He-

• 1:25:19David Pierce?

  You are my favorite. Let's be friends.

• 1:25:22Alex Cranz?

  I love a train guy. I love a train guy.

• 1:25:24David Pierce?

  And they all have like, 10 million views, which is so funny.

• 1:25:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28David Pierce?

  It's great. All right, my second one is that I saw the humane pin this morning.

• 1:25:33Alex Cranz?

  Ooh!

• 1:25:34David Pierce?

  This is the reason I'm in New York.

• 1:25:35Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 1:25:36David Pierce?

  So, the humane pin is coming out someday.

• 1:25:39Alex Cranz?

  We waited until- Now.

• 1:25:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, we have two to three more hours.

• 1:25:44Alex Cranz?

  Get ready.

• 1:25:46David Pierce?

  A, Humane put out a video yesterday, Wednesday, that I think was the single most useful piece of content Humane has ever published.

• 1:25:54Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:25:55David Pierce?

  It's like almost 20 minutes long and they're basically just like, here is what the AI pin is. Here's what it does and here's how it works.

• 1:26:01Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:26:01David Pierce?

  Very helpful. And then I got to go see this morning and talk to Imran and Bethany, the co-founders of the company, spent like 90 minutes just goofing around with the thing. I still have lots of questions. We're going to get to review it at some point. I'm very excited about it, but I actually got to like hold the thing in my hand and use it. And I will say, I have, I have said a lot of mean things about the AI pin on this podcast. It's a very cool piece of technology. Is it a good product that is worth the money? I don't know. It still feels like probably not, but like they made the thing, like it works.

• 1:26:32Alex Cranz?

  I want to point out, I, I'm now a Peacock fan and you're now.

• 1:26:36David Pierce?

  Oh God, what have we become?

• 1:26:37Alex Cranz?

  Who are we? Like Neelai goes.

• 1:26:39David Pierce?

  And Neelai hits free speech. Like, oh my God. This is where we are. This is life now. But no, I, I'm actually very excited about it because we're, we're in this phase now where we're going to get the Humane AI pin. And then I think sometime like in weeks, not months later, we're going to get the Rabbit R1. And then there's also this company Brilliant Labs, which makes the frame glasses. And I was talking to their CEO yesterday. They're about to ship in April. And so we're getting this first run of like real honest to God AI gadgets.

• 1:27:07Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:27:08David Pierce?

  And it's going to be really interesting. And we're like, the big question is basically like, are any of these better than a smartphone? Do I need this if I have a smartphone? Shouldn't these have just been smartphone apps? Like, super fun, interesting questions. Like, what does a smartphone mean in my life? Is I think like a big question of 2024 for a lot of people. Uh, it certainly has been for me so far. And like, I'm just very excited to try all of these gadgets. And just playing with the pin, it was like, okay, I have big questions about how this fits into my life and whether $700 and a pretty expensive monthly subscription. Is a pretty steep price tag that this thing meets. TBD, but like

• 1:27:47Alex Cranz?

  How did it feel?

• 1:27:47David Pierce?

  The thing works, it feels really good.

• 1:27:49Alex Cranz?

  Does it?

• 1:27:49David Pierce?

  Just from like a pure, like, they made a gadget thing. It just feels good.

• 1:27:55Alex Cranz?

  It hits that spot.

• 1:27:55David Pierce?

  It's got a charging case that feels like one of those sort of worry stones and has a really nice hinge, like, it's, it's made by people who love hardware in a way that I very much appreciate. Did they make a good product? I don't know, but boy, did they make a cool thing that I'm like, the laser projector, I am so spectacularly unconvinced by.

• 1:28:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13David Pierce?

  But it's kind of fun to like, do the thing and you like tip your hand forward to scroll down and it's like deeply silly, but it was kind of fun.

• 1:28:19Alex Cranz?

  I love watching you do this just now.

• 1:28:22David Pierce?

  That's literally what you do. You hold it up and it's like, kind of right at this level.

• 1:28:25Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:26David Pierce?

  And then if you want to scroll down, you literally just tilt your hand towards you. And if you want to scroll up, you tilt your hand away.

• 1:28:31Alex Cranz?

  Like a segue.

• 1:28:32David Pierce?

  And then you click to click. It's a, it's a hand segue.

• 1:28:37David Pierce?

  It's a virtual segue for your palm.

• 1:28:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, of course. That's how they actually pitched it every once.

• 1:28:44David Pierce?

  But yeah, I suspect if, if humane is right about when it's going to ship, that should happen very soon. They've been saying like end of March, it was supposed to be earlier in March. They've been saying end of March, I think into April potentially. So like, all of this is happening and we've been talking about these gadgets for months.

• 1:29:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01David Pierce?

  And we're actually going to get to like, use them in the world. And I'm very excited about it.

• 1:29:04Alex Cranz?

  I am so excited for you.

• 1:29:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's going to be good stuff.

• 1:29:06Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:29:07David Pierce?

  My goal is for my review of the AI pin to be longer than Nilay's 8,500 word review of the vision pro.

• 1:29:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna put a

• 1:29:15David Pierce?

  Really excited.

• 1:29:16Alex Cranz?

  Word count like maximum on you.

• 1:29:18David Pierce?

  Just close the Google Doc.

• 1:29:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20David Pierce?

  At 2,500 words. That feels right.

• 1:29:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22David Pierce?

  All right. We have gone on way too long.

• 1:29:24Alex Cranz?

  We've had a great time.

• 1:29:24David Pierce?

  As we are want to do. This has been very fun. Yeah, thank you for doing this. Thanks to Lauren for being here. Nilay for joining from the beach. We are also going to be talking so much about this. Like, I think it's, it's going to be a weird case because it's going to ebb and flow pretty aggressively. Like, I think my guess would be that we're going to have a bunch more news in the next few days as reactions start to come in and we start to get more reporting on what people are thinking and where some of this evidence comes from and who are the other companies that are being kind of obliquely referred to in the complaint. Big lull, like big lull, and then we're gonna get discovery. And, and like, it's gonna pop off.

• 1:30:01Alex Cranz?

  When discovery happens, for our listeners, that's when you get all the good gossip.

• 1:30:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be wild. And then someday between now and like 2064, this might actually go to trial.

• 1:30:12Alex Cranz?

  There'll be a trial, maybe a consent decree. I love a consent decree. I do, actually.

• 1:30:16David Pierce?

  I love a consent.

• 1:30:17Alex Cranz?

  Who doesn't love a consent decree?

• 1:30:18David Pierce?

  We should have been the flagship podcast of consent decrees.

• 1:30:21Alex Cranz?

  No, it's performance phones, which is, that's what they call the iPhone. They, they say the iPhone is a performance smartphone. It's not a, a, a regular smartphone.

• 1:30:31David Pierce?

  It's a cool smartphone.

• 1:30:31Alex Cranz?

  It's a cool smartphone. It's got race car stripes.

• 1:30:35David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta get out of here. Uh, there's tons of good stuff on theverge.com. Our whole team has done an awesome job covering the antitrust stuff today. We have an amazing story stream with all the stuff from the presser and the complaint and all kinds of stuff. So keep it locked there. There's still lots more to come. We will be back next Tuesday, next Friday, forever and ever.

• 1:30:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's gonna be good times.

• 1:30:55David Pierce?

  We'll see you then. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:30:57Alex Cranz?

  Bye.

• 1:31:01David Pierce?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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